Infectious Bronchitis Virus variants

Available vaccines are able to cross-protect against IBV variant Italian&dash;02 that was isolated in Italy in the 1990's.

IBV variant Italian&dash;02

In the late 1990's a series of IBV strains isolated in Italy were studied closely. The sequence analysis of one of these, designated “Italian&dash;02”, was published in 2002 &lpar;NCBI&dash;BLAST, number AJ457137&rpar;. Then, in a study carried out in 2004 using the RT&dash;PCR technique, &lpar;Worthington KC et al, 2004&rpar; it was found that this Italian&dash;02 strain, is widespread in Europe and that, apart from IBV variant strain 4/91 it has become one of the most predominant genotypes in the UK, Spain, France and The Netherlands. Nevertheless, the importance of “Italian&dash;02” as a major pathogen for poultry is still questionable. This is because the studies so far performed have simply detected the virus genome, very few virus isolates have been obtained and so it has not been proved that this IBV strain is pathogenic in chickens in the field.

Protection against Italian&dash;02

Several experiments were carried out in order to investigate the efficacy of different vaccination programs against a challenge with Italian&dash;02. The following experiment was carried out by Dr. Giovanni Tosi, from the “Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale della Lombardia e dell’Emilia Romagna” in Forlí, Italy.

Design

150 SPF chickens of 1 day of age, divided in 5 groups &lpar;30 birds/group&rpar; in isolators.

Conclusion:

All vaccination programs induced a good level of protection against challenge with Italian&dash;02 as shown by the ciliostasis test results and the absence of clinical signs in the vaccinated birds in spite of the virus reisolation &lpar;or recognition by PCR&rpar; in all groups after challenge.

This experiment reinforces the importance of the concept of protectotypes.